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'Desperate' North Korea turns to bank hacking sprees to rake in much-needed dosh
Hackers backed by the North Korea government are attempting to ransack foreign banks to raise funds for the cash-strapped hermit nation.
Researchers at FireEye say that a gang dubbed APT38* are trying to pull off a billion-dollar money grab, and are working separate from the infamous Nork-sponsored Lazarus group.
According to FireEye, the APT38 group is apparently operating as a subset of a larger North Korean hacking operation known as TEMP.Hermit. The bank-focused group is thought to be behind North Korean cyber-attacks on the 2016 Bank of Bangladesh heist and the 2018 Banco de Chile attack, and others, incidents that had previously only been believed to have been TEMP.Hermit operations.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 07 2018, @11:19AM (9 children)
N. Korea is becoming somewhat less of a hermitage, isn't it? If things progress a little further, they'll require a new moniker.
Had to think a few moments - N. Korea is supposedly a Communist nation. But, in some ways, they don't seem very Communistic. Just to check, I did a search for "type of government in N. Korea".
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-type-of-government-does-north-korea-have.html [worldatlas.com]
So, less communistic than it is a hereditary dictatorship. Just had to clarify all of that . . .
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 07 2018, @12:36PM (3 children)
What is dosh?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 07 2018, @12:45PM
According to the dictionary:
Dosh (n)
British, informal. : money
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 07 2018, @01:03PM (1 child)
Context? Dinero, bread, cash, coin, clink, dead presidents, bucks, cabbage, change, green, moola, scratch, tender, wampum, scrip, clams, dough, lucre, moola, simoleons, scratch, loot, and probably a helluva lot more.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday October 07 2018, @02:41PM
Andrew Jackson continues to be on the $20 bill. I’m a big Andrew Jackson fan. Obama wanted to do Harriet Tubman. Not on my watch, folks!!!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday October 07 2018, @01:55PM
It's communist in the worst sense: the hereditary dictator's organization is the only owner of most things, therefore the people are sort of "all in it together" like in Communism, but otherwise screwed.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Sunday October 07 2018, @01:58PM (2 children)
Well, communism has many flavours. North Korea is a derivative of the Marxist–Leninist more typically seen, but (almost?) all of the communist governments seen have been autocratic with different methods of choosing successors.
In North Korea the state does control the methods of production so in an economic sense North Korea falls well within the definition of communism.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday October 07 2018, @03:45PM (1 child)
They were all brainwashed to believe that they fought for Communism in the name of some manner of Deity that was all their own.
Children were taught to follow orders unhesitantly, even to the point of killing their own parents if ordered to do so.
The Killing Fields was the result of the Khmer Rouge driving all the city dwellers out into the countryside, where they were told to grow all their own food without seeds or farming tools. Estimates of the dead range as high as four million.
There was a prison that held 27,000 prisoners, of which only 7 survived. Yes both those figures have the right numbers of digits.
Vietnamese Communism by contrast, because Vietnam was a French colony until 1955, and because Ho Chi Minh attended an elite French high school in Vietnam, was heavily influenced by the French Revolution, as well as being very intellectual.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday October 07 2018, @10:00PM
To be fair, Ho Chi Minh was never really a Communist, he was a Nationalist.
After WWI he was one of the Vietnamese party at the Versailles peace talks trying to get independence from France.
During WWII the OSS supplied and funded his fight against Japan, in exchange for independence, which was never given, so he turned to the Soviet Union for arms and money to fight the French, but when the USSR began acting like his boss, he ditched them for China, who he also fell out with, and fought a border war with.
The common thread there is that he would never sacrifice Vietnamese independence to anyone.
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Monday October 08 2018, @12:57PM
They are communist, but there's more than one flavor of communism, which exists along a spectrum. Nobody's really doing a "pure" economy without influence from other paradigms anymore. It's an approach that is trying to curtain the downsides of the primary system using the tools made available by other systems.
Note that North Koreans attribute some of the success the current leader has enjoyed to his toning down of enforcement against the food black markets. They've got multiple kinds of small-scale grassroots unauthorized black markets that have been helping the people increase their standard of living off the government's balance sheet. These markets are functionally "free market" incarnate as there's no enforcement by definition. The government these days knows about the situation and just pretends to not notice until its convenient for them as an excuse to arrest someone annoying or whatever. The previous leader was less successful in getting general support partly because he spent tremendous resources trying to quash these things instead of doing something constructive.